We know that agriculture began in the Fertile Crescent about 12,000 years ago and then spread across Europe between 9,000 and 6,000 years ago. But what exactly was it that spread? Was it the idea of agriculture or agriculturalists themselves? Just-published work on the DNA of modern and ancient pigs says it was probably a bit of both. It seems that Middle Eastern farmers migrated into Europe carrying their agrobiodiversity with them — crops and domesticated animals. But, as far as the pig was concerned anyway, they soon adopted a locally domesticated version in preference to the Middle Eastern type they had brought along.
Mini-watermelons
I had no idea there was such a thing as a mini-watermelon, let alone a mania about them, as suggested by a piece in FreshPlaza. But apparently, in addition to being easier to carry, they’re also good for you. I haven’t been able to find information on how these nutritious, small-fruited varieties were developed, but it does seem to have been through conventional breeding.
Use monoculture to pay for diversity
Palm oil plantations destroy the biodiversity of the forests they replace. But high-falutin’ ideas of paying farmers not to plant oil palms are doomed to failure for two reasons. First, as developing countries rush to point out, Europe and America destroyed their own forests to power their development, so who are they to ask developing countries to forego similar development? Secondly, palm oil is so profitable that very little else is likely to appeal to farmers. Lian Pin Koh and David Wilcove have a nifty idea in a recent Nature. Conservationists should invest in small palm oil plantations and use the profits to buy — and protect — rainforest.
Koh and Wilcove say that a typical mature oil-palm plantation in Malaysia makes an annual net profit of roughly $2,000 per hectare. Existing oil palm-cultivated land sells for about $12,500 per hectare, so the capital investment could be recovered in just 6 years. Thereafter, the profits from a 5,000-hectare oil palm plantation would be about $10 million, which could buy 1,800 hectares of forest each year. The forest would be set aside as private nature reserves. Furthermore, new and more sustainable palm plantations could then be established on degraded land, which is feasible, but currently not as cheap as chopping down forest.
Sounds to me like a plan.
The Nature paper is behind a paywall; more details at Biopact and Mongabay.
China outbreeds India
A leader in The Hindu asks: “How did China manage to outstrip India in agriculture when the two countries were more or less on a par on most parameters 25 years ago?” It then goes on to list the reasons given by Prof. Huang Jikun, Director of the Centre for Chinese Agricultural Policy, for China’s superior agricultural performance
technological improvements accruing from research and development, investment in rural infrastructure and an increasingly liberalised agricultural policy.
That sounds plausible. But perhaps the most interesting comments were that
the Chinese authorities received and assessed as many as 2,046 applications for the registration of new plant varieties in the five years between 1999 and 2004
while
the number of field crop varieties released by the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) actually fell by 50 per cent between 1997 and 2001, despite the fact that there was a sharp and sustained increase in funding for the organisation.
Well, the two statements are not really comparing like with like, but the implied equation of plant breeding output with the overall performance of the agricultural sector is intriguing. I wonder if there’s a worldwide dataset that could be used to test the connection.
Anyway, talking of Indian breeding, there’s an interview in India’s The Statesman with Tamil Nadu Agricultural University vice-chancellor C. Ramasamyan on the effort to improve — and thus revive — traditional rice landraces in that state.
Animal genetic resources conference
The First International Technical Conference on Animal Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture is on at Interlaken, Switzerland. Earth Negotiations Bulletin is providing daily reports. The first official press release is also out. Are you there? Would you like to tell us what is going on? Drop us a line.